“The Razor’s Edge” deals in an artificial way with the depressing story of some vital young Chicagoans of the twenties who lead self-centered, destructive, loveless lives while their elders either stand by and watch or work against their happiness. The opening scene, a dinner party for blue-noses in 1919, with a small 45-piece band, introduces all the central figures when they are happy, uncomplicated and looking forward to the future. Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power), a snappy country-club type, deeply distressed by his war experience, is inclined to ruminate profoundly about things like “The dead look so dead when they’re dead.” He yearns to bum around until he finds out some of the why and wherefore of life. His sweetheart with the clear, metallic voice (Gene Tierney) wants a mink-coated life but is willing to wait a year for him so that he can have his loaf. The parental old guard includes Templeton, a supercilious fancy-pants (Clifton Webb)—a contrasting character to the hero—and Somerset Maugham (played in a disintegrating fashion by Herbert Marshall).
Larry forsakes their upper-crust life to search for a religious faith. He spends the first year in France, mixing with the hoi polloi in his particularly annoying way, looking smug, vacant, never saying anything and seeming rather a bore and a fake in his role as philosophic commoner. When Isabel turns down his offer of marriage, he takes it in his usual carefree, wooden way and goes off to India. There, miraculously, without disturbing Hollywood, he finds God among some artificial-looking mountains and religious folk. Now sufficiently wise and good to cure anything from migraine to dipsomania, and looking like the newest thing in religious leaders—neat, unmarked and well kept as a putting green—he buries himself in the masses to do good deeds and learn even more about life.
The movie, filled with bachelors, widows, loveless and tragically broken-up marriages, is also full of depressing people who are palmed off as good-hearted, generous, wise and constructive. You constantly feel Larry is a man to be pitied rather than a human being who has a corner on virtue. Though he is supposed to be completely gone on exotic, bony Isabel, he doesn’t do a thing about it, and his bland forsaking of her to search for wisdom makes him seem extraordinarily self-centered. His search has more the quality of a sickly escape from all problems and human relationships than a pursuit of religious faith, but there is no sign that the director ever considered it that way. The movie actually seems like a vote for people such as Darrell, the snobbish, spinsterish Templeton and the stuffy author who stands aloof from life in a superior, tight-lipped way.
The boyishness, detachment and vacancy projected by Tyrone Power as Larry Darrell seem apt enough for this part. Despite these seemingly unintentional authentic notes and the fact that he moves in a brisk, stylish way, he never plays the role from the inside and he acts with all the earmarks of a drama-school student. Anne Baxter is very moving and strange as a memory-ridden, heartbroken, blousy whore, and Clifton Webb, in a deathbed scene that drips virtuosity, is responsible for one of the outstanding moments of the year. “The Razor’s Edge” was directed by Edmund Goulding in a careful, stagey, $4-million style which somehow becomes more like pantomime than real life. The precise, slow, rhythmical movements are often very interesting.
December 9, 1946